Lines 1-7

Allegory, which is organized into eleven five-line stanzas and a final three-line stanza, begins with the speaker offering to console the reader with music. The speaker's use of the pronoun us implies that there is a group of artists behind the creative effort, as at the bottom of Guston's painting, which lists composer, painter, sculptor, and poet on what appears to be a wave.

In lines 3 through 5, the speaker begins to say that we (probably referring, again, to the categories of artists listed in Guston's painting) are caught in / this sphere (possibly referring to the earth) where it does not matter whether Prometheus hears their song. This sentence continues over the stanza break between lines 5 and 6, which is an example of enjambment, a convention in which a phrase continues from one line of poetry to the next.